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Over the next few weeks, I want to experiment with fleshing out the concept of a Content Interpreter, a content logic pattern that allows an enterprise to best leverage their content's value.

Today, content creators and publishers are challenged with how to best leverage their content’s value. Many are struggling in this digital world where user-generated content is king and a few niche players who don’t have a content-creation background are vying to re-define how people consume content in the digital age (hello google). Looking forward, early Web 3.0 speculation is that mature internet users will be seeking premium content and the internet will become a worldwide database requiring content that can be adapted quickly in order to plug seamlessly into new digital formats.

I'm thinking that the concept of a Content Interpreter - a system that allows content-centric enterprises to leverage their content’s value by making it easily available in comprehensible formats would help content creators overcome this challenge. A Content Interpreter is the key to empowering content, especially when working with a large digital archive.

Next - the challenge of leveraging your content's value and more about the content interpeter...

Publishers and content-driven enterprises are facing the challenge of how to best leverage their contents’ value in the digital age. Many publishers and content creators are struggling to compete in a world where user-generated content is commanding as much attention as professionally-generated content, and where companies without publishing or content creation backgrounds are vying to re-define how people consume content.

Some traditional publishers have been late to realize these difficulties – which arose for them with the advent of Web 2.0 – and even more challenges and opportunities are on the horizon. Looking forward to Web 3.0, early speculation is that mature internet users will be seeking premium content, and the internet will become a worldwide database necessitating content that can be adapted quickly and plugged seamlessly into new digital formats.

Faced with current and future challenges, the goal of all publishers and content creators must be to leverage their content’s value to its fullest potential through digital distribution, syndication, and other content re-purposing strategies.

Today there are three main hurdles that all content-centric enterprises must overcome in order to thrive:

- Preparing and managing content.
- Researching and interpreting content to leverage its greatest value.
- Deploying content over digital distribution channels.

We'll be looking at these items in our upcoming posts.

Business users need to interpret and evaluate their content to best leverage it. To do so, business users need to execute searches across content with an eye to what information might be monetized, how that content might be grouped, packaged, or syndicated, and how the content will appear across various digital distribution channels.

For such activities to occur effectively across very large content collections, content must stored in a structured format: broken down into contextually-defined atomic parts (i.e. sections, sub-sections, paragraphs) in order to facilitate effective searches. Because of its ability to contextualize and structure content, XML, as we all know, is the natural format for delivering content over the internet.

Unlike PDFs, Office, Quark, InDesign and other digital formats, the XML format contains all of the data characteristics and structural information needed to aid effective searches and group data effectively. Well-designed XML is contextually self-aware because it not only defines what a specific piece of content is – but it also defines its contextual location. For example, XML may show that a particular piece of content is within a sub-section of a section of a larger object and is in the same layer as other objects, etc.

Many content creators are already storing their data in XML, and most content syndication is done through an XML format. The bottom line is that the glue that’s tying content together on the internet today is XML. Even MS Office 2007 now stores its documents natively in XML as zipped up collections of XML files under the .docx or .xlsx extension.

In the next post, we'll discuss how to manage the XML in preparation for use within a Content Interpreter.